Best Political Trend

Pleading Guilty and then Proclaiming Your Innocence

Staff Pick

We all know that politics attracts scum like a stagnant pond downhill from a chicken processing plant, but sometimes we’re amazed by how utterly slimy it can be. And this year, two of the slimiest of the slimy doubled down on their slime. First, former S.C. Speaker of the House Bobby Harrell pled guilty to using campaign funds for personal use, and later former state Sen. Robert Ford admitted he had also used campaign money to buy personal items, including boner pills. Those two actions alone are worthy of our contempt, but it’s what Ford and Harrell did after admitting their guilt in court that really gets our goat: They frikkin denied they had done anything wrong and claimed they weren’t guilty of the very ethical violations they admitted to being guilty of. For some reason, neither man was run out of town by an angry mob.